One of the most insightful pieces of business advice I enjoyed recently was reading the business strategies of top executives. One piece stood out among the rest, from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos: Focus on what doesn’t change. When we think about this advice, this focus, it makes total sense. Amazon doesn’t attempt to change the core…
While we spend an awful lot of time packing physical goods for vacation, I often forget to do my digital packing. At least once a year I take time off, including time off the grid. No phone, no internet, no connection to the outside world. Yet, I still want to read and feed my brain…
Nicholas asked, “What does your “marketing stack” consist of at the moment? Which specific tools, products, services are you using and how do you get them all talking to each other?” My personal marketing technology stack changes frequently. Why? I use myself as the guinea pig for new tools and methods. One of my rules…
Few things are as compelling to marketers as the promise of prediction. Every marketer wants to know what will happen; what has happened is of less interest because we can’t change the past. If we knew what was likely to happen, we could plan in advance for it. Suppose we knew what was going to…
Many marketers have a need for transcription of audio and video data, but the prices and quality on the market vary wildly. Let’s compare the options and look at the transcription/speech recognition landscape to see what fits our marketing needs best. Why Transcription? We face more and more rich media content as marketers – audio,…
One of the most common and trite business cliches is the term low-hanging fruit, implying activities we could do which would yield fast, easy results. Low-hanging fruit also implies a limited amount, a resource that is depleted quickly. Do such things exist in digital marketing and digital advertising? Yes, they do. The lowest hanging fruit,…
Content shock has hit marketing like a tsunami. We marketers are no longer assured of reaching our audiences in any medium: Organic social media content’s reach continues its decline to zero. Public relations struggles with traditional media’s ongoing demise, as more news outlets close up shop. Paid advertising’s reach and clickthrough rates to broad audiences…
Where do we start? How do we build a sales pipeline robust enough to hit our quota when we’ve nothing but a blank pad of paper, an empty contact list, and a fresh inbox? In this series, we’ll look at how to build a sales pipeline from scratch, using the most modern digital tools and…
Let’s say we’re the new person in our sales and marketing organization. It’s the first real day of work, after orientation, after employee on-boarding, after signing the employee handbook and dealing with all the paperwork of a new job. We’re seated at our desk, our phone is freshly sanitized, our inboxes are empty and our…
